


Bonemeal

by Magdeleine (obsession_inc)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Improv
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-07-01
Updated: 2000-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:39:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obsession_inc/pseuds/Magdeleine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here there be Pigs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bonemeal

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Abduction/cancer arc  
> Disclaimer: Not mine. They'll have more fun in parrotfic, I promise.

Stream-rounded stones shifted under Mulder's feet as he walked away from the farmhouse. The air was clear and smelled of wildflowers and chickens and the cool mossy scent of a huge oak tree. It was so quiet that he could hear the pigs clanking at their feeding station and the occasional hum of cars going by on the paved road three farms over, could hear the murmur of sheriff's deputies in their brown uniforms as they argued near the pigpen.

The barn was a faded red and scalloped on the bottom where the dirt was worn from underneath the wood where cats or dogs or raccoons had squeezed under the boards time and time again. He could feel the age of this place, feel the acceptance of birth and life and death and the cycle of the corn. Even buildings could rot here, returning to dust in a way that the stone cities never could.

His cell phone rang. He glanced at the number, recognized it as the local doctor who'd assisted Scully earlier, and couldn't bear to answer it. He would bet money that the woman had left forty messages of varying length on his voice mail, wanting to know how they'd known about the chip. Wanting to know how he'd known to come here so quickly. He couldn't face answering those questions, not now.

He walked under the oak tree, zeroing in on the swing made from a stuffed feed-sack dangling from a branch. The long rope hung too low for him to try the swing; it was built for generations of childish legs who had dragged their feet and worn a rut into the dark brown dirt beneath it. He gave the swing a gentle push and it arced away from him with the ghosts of all those children riding it, came back to tease its wiry surface against his hands. On the second arc he caught it and shoved, and the stuffed sack flew up, jerking in the air like an executed thief with the hangman's noose gone tight.

He watched the swing twist and spin, and breathed in the warm, thick smell of growth and rot entwined, the smell that people called earthy. Earth.

Scully put her hand on his shoulder and he turned to stare at her wildflower face turned up toward his, watered with shade. Her eyes asked a question and he nodded, shoulders slumping. For a heartbeat her strong fingers curled around his, squeezing, and then she let go and walked back to the farmhouse, stepping carefully where the gravel ended and the mulberry-stained sidewalk began. Mulder caught up with her   
near the steps to the screened-in porch and they entered the house together.

They had to go through the kitchen first, a huge room that smelled of boiled potatoes and dry cereal. It was ringed with aging appliances and solidly built cabinets and ruled by a circular table of some orange-ish wood that held only a round sugar bowl, precisely in the middle. Circles within circles. The door to the root cellar gaped open and a whiff of cold dirt and mold swept out. Plastic letters of a magnetized alphabet clung low on the side of the refrigerator; the tiny grubby fingerprints that bruised the appliance marking a child's territory even more clearly than the letters that spelled out "i lov daddy."

Molly Walmond sat in the living room in the exact center of the long blue sofa, her hands clasped in her lap and her head bowed. She was all bone and whipcord muscle, her hair scraped back into a wispy ponytail at the back of her neck. Scully sat beside Molly on the left, half-mimicking her   
posture; Mulder found a flimsy plastic folding chair leaning against the wall and set it up as the third point of the triangle, slightly to Molly's right.

Footsteps sounded overhead, the hard-soled thumps of cop shoes on hardwood floors. A small herd of them, by the sound of it, more eager to collect evidence upstairs than deal with the human wreckage left alone downstairs.

"You know what happened to my children," Molly said, very clearly. She did not look up.

"Why don't you tell us," Scully suggested, her voice soft as a chenille blanket. Outside the open window, the pigs clanked their feed trough around in their pen, making hollow metallic noises; one squealed, the sound muted by the thick air. Mulder glanced out and saw another police car roll into the parking lot, the gravel crunching beneath its tires. It parked with the others, a ragged line of various law enforcement, the blue Taurus seeming ridiculously civilian among them.

"Jason works at the factory during the day." Molly paused and seemed to stare at the dull rings on her left hand, which hung loosely between her bony knuckles. "He comes home in the evening and does chores, takes care of the kids while I go into town to work the night shift. This farm has been in his family for a hundred and fifty years and we're the last ones here. The last. He has four brothers and none of them would stay. Not one."

Scully waited through this with her patient expression, leaning in sympathetically. Mulder couldn't watch this dark stick-puppet of a woman in her grief; he let his eyes wander over the tight weave of the carpet, the old television, the waterless fish tank across the room that housed a single beady-eyed hamster. The hamster was attempting to stuff an entire pretzel rod into its mouth-pouch despite the fact that the pretzel was four inches long.

"I came home this morning around six and the kids were still asleep," Molly said evenly, a woman treading rocky ground with a careful, steady pace. "I thought. I thought they were asleep. And -- there was a knife on the table. I was so tired that I didn't notice the blood. I sat down with my bowl of Cheerios and waited for the kids to come downstairs for breakfast. They were usually up by that point and I thought it was strange but I was too tired... and that was when Jason came in from doing chores and I saw the blood on him. I only recognized the blood on the knife when I saw the blood on his shirt. It took me that long. I ate my Cheerios at that table--"

Scully reached out and took Molly's bony hand in hers as the stick-woman began to weep in dry, raspy sobs. This woman whose husband had butchered their three children in their beds and taken the little bodies out to grind them into bone meal, which he had then fed to the pigs. This woman whose husband had calmly come back to eat breakfast with dark blood soaking his T-shirt and jeans, and who was now sitting calmly in the county jail, his mind quite gone.

Scully had found a chip in the man's neck only an hour ago.

Another former abductee. The third they'd found in this county, the third to turn suddenly homicidal this week. There was no telling how many more of them there were. No telling who would be next, or who they'd kill.

Across the room, the hamster was waddling around the tank with its head cocked back at a ridiculous angle, the pretzel rod sticking out and making it look like the last pitiful descendant of some more violent, prehistoric rodent. Outside, the pigs snorted and clanked at their feed troughs.

The urge to move was too much, and Mulder left the room. He went outside, skirting the huge sheepdog sniffing at the bloody boot-prints that Jason Walmond had left behind, and leaned against the mulberry tree. Fruit rotted beneath his feet, stinking and sweet.

Scully came outside long minutes later. He heard her pick her way through the fallen mulberries with the careful distaste of a cat walking through mud. She stopped on the opposite side of the tree and stood, stiff and silent, not looking at him.

"Those kids--" he said softly.

"I know."

"It makes me sick, Scully. Did the police find-- any--"

"Most of it was already gone." She was looking across the yard, watching a single police officer shoo chickens away from the pig pen. "They got enough to prove what happened."

Her eyes glinted silver in the shade before she turned her head.

He watched her for a long time, his gaze on the back of her neck. "Scully--"

"I'm all right, Mulder."

"I don't--"

"I'll be fine. You don't have to worry about me." She finally looked at him, her will a tangible thing behind her eyes.

Something twisted and broke inside him. He took a step closer, his hand closing over empty space between them, somehow unable to close the distance. "What if--"

"Shhh."

He could see her teeth, very white against her red lips. Her hand was cold as it slipped over his throat in slow motion, her fingernails scraping his skin. The wind rustled the green branches and swirled the life and death of the world through the air around them.

Her voice fell like the blade of a knife.

"I'm not the one you should worry about, Mulder."

**Author's Note:**

> Author's notes: This is not my fault. Apparently wen has started a trend; Sabine handed me three elements and gave me two hours to write, and this is what came out. The elements: pretzel rods, a chenille blanket, and forty voice mail messages left by the same person.
> 
> Don't ask how three innocent things like that turned into *this*. Your guess is as good as mine.
> 
> Start Time: 10:35 PM, 6/23/00  
> Finished: 12:38 AM, 6/24/00
> 
> Thanks (I think) to Sab for pushing me into this, to Cofax, Shannono, Marasmus, and Punk Maneuverability for beta, and to the other Virginians for reading and for taking my panic in stride. You're all darling and I will get back at you for this later.
> 
> *** For those of you who are wondering, yes, I'm almost done with the parrotfic, hereafter to be known as Gutless. I'm shooting for posting it starting July 4. And no, it is *nothing* like this.


End file.
